The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  For long seconds he stood there, looking at the first slender target. Robertson harrumphed and muttered something. It was surely intended as a distraction, but Will ignored it. He drew a deep breath and went to work.

  He stepped forward, leaning into his pull as his left foot went forward to the line, his straight left arm pushing the arcing bow stave forward while his massive chest, back, and shoulder muscles pulled the thick string of densely braided hemp back smoothly to his ear. The release was immensely powerful, and the line of flight was low, the arrow sinking so swiftly that I thought, for an instant, that it had fallen short. But then the target stake whipped violently and the arrow in its cleft sprang free and spun to the ground, its fall accompanied by a great shout from the crowd.

  Will had already nocked another arrow by then, and before the shout could die away he stepped into his second shot. His movements were a joy to watch, a sacred dance to a rhythm known only to himself, and he loosed all six of his arrows in less time than Robertson had taken for his. But Will struck five marks close above the ground, within a hand’s breadth of their bases, and two of them dislodged arrows that Robertson had already placed. The sixth arrow had struck the ground at the base of the mark the other man had missed, but on closer examination it was found to have pierced the stake beneath the surface. Even without it, though, Will’s tally stood at five to Robertson’s remaining three.

  To his credit, the other archer said nothing. He walked the hundred measured paces to the line of target posts, where he stood looking down at Will’s handiwork. He shook his head in disbelief, for Will’s grouping truly was astounding. Of the five shafts that had struck above the ground, the highest was less than an inch above the lowest. Robertson reached into the pouch at his waist and brought out a small leather purse; he hefted it in his hand, then lobbed it underhand to Will.

  “I’ve never seen the like,” he said. “And I’ve never been so outmatched. I’ll stay out of your way, ’gin we ever meet again, Will Wallace.”

  The two nodded to each other, in mutual respect, then bent to gather up their spent arrows as the crowd surged forward, and there was pandemonium as every man there wanted to shake the hand of each of the contestants. Will turned his back on the well-wishers and caught my eye. He threw the purse to me. “Take that to James while I finish up here.”

  I took the money to Laithey, and as I turned away I saw the group of young people who had come to visit Jessie Brunton now thronging around Will. Jessie, I knew, had been recently married to a friendly young fellow called Tam Brunton, a miller who worked on Sir Malcolm’s estate. I had known her by her unmarried name, Jessie Waddie. She was the eldest daughter of Ian Waddie, a prosperous Paisley wool merchant. Waddie, it now turned out, was married to Margaret Braidfoot of Lamington, near Lanark, whose brother Hugh, a successful sheep farmer and therefore a valued associate of Ian Waddie, had a daughter called Mirren, whose presence was the underlying reason for today’s visit from all these young people. Mirren, aged seventeen, had come to Paisley on what had become an annual visit, to spend the summer with her beloved Auntie Meg and her daughters.

  Jessie herself was standing close by, a slightly bemused smile on her face as though at a loss to explain her sudden popularity even to herself, and I went and spoke to her for a few moments, asking about her visitors. When I turned away from her again, I saw the tallest youth in the party struggling to pull Will’s bow, and I was amazed that Will would permit such a thing. It was only later—much later—that Will gave me his own slightly dazed account of what had happened while my back was turned.

  2

  “Who was the fellow trying to pull your bow? The big fellow the girls were all admiring?”

  “Who? I don’t know. He’s one of Mirren’s friends.”

  “He was dressed as a forester. Had you ever seen him before?”

  “No, but he’s a Bruce man. He’s a woodsman, though, not a forester.”

  “Is there a difference?”

  That earned me a stare from beneath slightly raised eyebrows. “Aye, there’s a big difference, and fine you know it. A woodsman patrols the woods, looking for poachers, but that’s all he does. He has a forester to tell him what to do and where to go and when. He wears the green and he works in the woods, but he knows nothing of forestry, beyond being able to move quietly in the thickets.”

  “Which Bruce does he work for, Annandale or Carrick?”

  “The old man, Annandale. He owns the land alongside ours, to the south and west.”

  We were sitting together by the fire in Sir Malcolm’s main room, late that same night. Sir Malcolm and Lady Margaret were long since abed, and we would have been, too, save that I was enjoying my time away from the Abbey too much to want to sleep, and Will was too tightly wound over the events of the afternoon. If he had mentioned Mirren Braidfoot once since we came home that day he had mentioned her a score of times; her name was rarely absent from his conversation, what little there was of that. I was perplexed, for I could hardly remember him ever mentioning any girl by name twice in the same day. But there he was, sitting across from me yet barely there, his gaze focused on whatever vision he was seeing in the leaping flames in the grate.

  “So you don’t know this fellow’s name, the one who had your bow?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you let him take it?”

  “What? Oh, because he wanted to.”

  “He wanted to. And you just let him? Will, you won’t even let me carry that bow. Why would you give it to someone you didn’t know, and let him play with it?”

  “Mirren wanted me to.”

  “Mirren wanted … I think you’d better tell me— Will? Are you listening? Tell me what happened when you met this Mirren. How did you meet her?”

  He frowned, blinking. “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember. She was just there, suddenly, yellow and blue …”

  It was enough for me to see her clearly. She had been wearing a yellow kirtle over a blue gown, and Will’s eyes were wide again with the recollection of it.

  “I’d seen them there,” he continued, “the folk from Paisley, but I hadn’t noticed her before they all came flocking around me, and then there she was. Sweet Jesu, Jamie, but she’s bonnie. She was looking right at me, her eyes on mine, and I swear I near fell into them, they were so big. And so blue, like her gown. They were all talking to me, shouting at me, but I could hardly hear them and she never said a word. She just stared at me, and then she smiled. I thought she was going to laugh at me and my heart nearly stopped for shame, but she didn’t. She just looked and smiled. And God help me, I couldna smile back at her. I tried, I wanted to, but my face felt as though it was made of wood. I couldna make it work. And I just stood there, gawking at her like some daft wee laddie …

  “And then that fellow tried to take my bow, wanted to try it. She saw me start to turn on him and stopped me … with her eyes. She didn’t speak. Her eyes … they flashed at me, warning me, I thought, though I didn’t know against what. Then she looked at him, and at the bow, and back at me, and nodded. And I let him take it, along with an arrow from my bag, a broadhead. Then he walked away and all the others followed him to see how he would do. And we were left alone, the two of us.” He looked at me, and his eyes were wide with wonder.

  “What did she say to you?”

  “That her name was Mirren. She knew mine already. Someone must have told her. She asked me where I lived, and when I told her, she said that I should come and look for her within the week, at her uncle’s house in Paisley, in the evening when my work was done … It was the strangest thing, Jamie. She told me how to find her, and when to come, and yet she never looked at me. She kept her eyes on the young fool with the bow the whole time, as though watching him and leaving me ignored, like a log on the ground. And then she said I should take my bow back, so I did. The poor gowk hadn’t even drawn it to half pull. I took off the string, put the stave back in its case, and when I turned around again he w
as helping her up onto the wagon, and they left. She never looked at me again. Just left me standing there like a witless stirk.”

  “But she told you when and where to find her, Will. And did it privily, with no one being the wiser. Plainly she wanted none of them to know. Women do that sometimes.”

  He looked at me as though I had crowed like a cockerel. “Do what?”

  I shrugged, aware of my own witlessness. “Behave strangely.”

  “How would you know that? Who told you such a thing?”

  “Nobody told me … I must have heard it somewhere.”

  “Hmm. Then did you happen to hear what I should do now?”

  “No, but I know … You should do as she bade you. Look for her in Paisley at her uncle’s house the next time you are free of an evening.”

  3

  The woodsman’s name was Graham, and he came from a village called Kilbarchan, some twelve miles from Elderslie, though he now lived in a bothy on the Bruce lands south of us. Will learned his name quickly, for Graham of Kilbarchan was forever underfoot—like dung on a new boot was how Will put it—whenever he went to Paisley to see Mirren, and he soon grew to loathe the sight of the man. A week elapsed before he could wind up the courage to go and look for her at the home of her uncle, Waddie the wool merchant. He found her without difficulty, for she had been expecting him and was watching for him, but there his true difficulties began.

  Mirren’s uncle took his responsibilities seriously, and the safety and moral welfare of his sister’s only daughter while she was in his care was one of his main concerns that summer. The girl was beautiful, and wealthy by Paisley standards, so she attracted admirers and suitors as a blooming bank of flowers draws bees, and Ian Waddie had to deal with all of them.

  Unfortunately for Will, he dealt equally with all of them save one, treating them uniformly with hostile disapproval. The sole exception was the young woodsman from Kilbarchan, who was the only son of Alexander Graham of Kilbarchan, another of Master Waddie’s prime suppliers of fine wool. This Graham had amassed sufficient wealth and property in a lifetime of hard work and sharp dealings to make his son appear as a supremely qualified suitor, despite the young man’s general fecklessness, and that impression was greatly enhanced by the father’s advanced age and rapidly failing health. Young Sandy would inherit everything, and for that reason alone, according to Mirren, Ian Waddie would have encouraged his suit even had the young man been a drunkard and a leper.

  We spoke about this, Will and I, when next we met, about three weeks after his first encounter with Mirren, and I asked him, naively I suppose, why he put up with the fellow instead of sending him packing. He glanced at me sidelong, and I immediately saw how his involvement with Mirren had already changed him. The Will I had known all my life would have purged the young woodsman from his life as soon as Graham began to be a nuisance. The Will eyeing me now, though, was another person; he flushed slowly, and admitted, sheepishly, that it was Mirren’s idea to keep young Graham close by. The woodsman had her uncle’s goodwill and his full approval to spend time with her, and Mirren was clever enough to know that she could benefit thereby, simply by including Will in their excursions whenever he could arrange to visit Paisley. And when Will could not be there, to keep up the appearance of both consistency and propriety, she invariably invited another from her coterie of admirers to join her and Graham on their evening walks. It worked, of course.

  By being unfailingly pleasant and congenial with Graham, yet keeping support and moral guidance close to hand at all times in the form of a third, amorously interested presence, Mirren managed to avoid awkwardness or entanglement with any of the young men, and by the time her stay in Paisley was half over she had overcome all her uncle’s suspicions and won grudging acknowledgment from him that she was more than capable of protecting herself against the blandishments of the local swains. Waddie came to accept that there was nothing he could do to overcome his niece’s refusal to encourage Sandy Graham’s attentions, since it was obvious she did nothing to discourage them, either. Much as he was attracted to the idea of bringing Graham’s wealth into his own family, and by association into his own purview, he was realistic enough to accept that he was not the girl’s father and that the best way to promote his plans must be to gain her father’s support in favour of a union between his daughter and the young woodsman.

  I discovered that by merest happenstance, for Master Waddie came to the Abbey one day in search of assistance in composing and writing an important letter, and I was the one assigned to the task by Brother Duncan, since I had performed similar clerical services in the past for several of the town’s merchants. By the time Master Waddie’s letter began to take shape and I began to discern what was involved, I could hardly stop the work in progress. Besides, I judged the content harmless, apart from the sole consideration that its effect might have a bearing on the affairs of my closest friend. And so, in the spirit of the confessional, I resigned myself to keeping its content to myself. Will would never know of its existence, and I would use my knowledge of it only if such knowledge should ever be of benefit.

  The letter was, of course, to Master Waddie’s goodbrother Hugh Braidfoot, and it extolled the shining virtues of a potential husband he had found for young Mirren, namely Master Alexander Graham. The letter was duly signed and sealed and sent off to Mirren’s home in Lamington, a few miles outside Lanark town. I no longer wondered about Will’s tolerance of the woodsman Graham.

  In the meantime, to Will’s appalled disbelief, the summer weeks sped by and Mirren returned home to her family, leaving him close to despair at the thought of the empty year that yawned ahead of him before she would return to Paisley. He could talk for hours on end, and often did, about the wonders and the exploding complexities of their burgeoning love. Many times I listened to his outpourings almost in disbelief, confounded by the intensity and the passion in what he was telling me and by the mysterious changes the experience had provoked in him. He had kissed her once, he confessed to me in breathless bliss; just once, and fleetingly, seizing a moment when they were alone, and he swore that the taste and textures of it lingered on his lips and in his very vitals weeks later. Floundering with what that could mean, I found myself regretting, almost painfully, that I would never experience such strange and tempestuous sensations.

  But then, as time swept onwards, a degree of sanity returned to my cousin’s world, and he became engrossed again in the work that he loved. I became his ex officio liaison with Mirren then, serving as postmaster for the bulky letters he inscribed to her almost daily and ensuring that they were forwarded to Lanark in the custody of the regular procession of brothers travelling on the Church’s affairs. Mirren, on her own behalf, had arranged to have her responses returned to me by the same route, though she was far less regular in her correspondence.

  Beyond our little world of church and greenwood, much was happening, and none of it, it seemed at first, had anything to do with Will and Mirren. At the Abbey we learned that the magnates of the realm had been successful in their approach to England’s King and had enlisted his aid in assuring the succession to the Scots throne of the child heir Margaret, whom people were already calling the Maid of Norway. A treaty to that effect had been signed at Salisbury in January of the new year, 1289, and a conclusive part of the same agreement was to be added the following year. Under the terms of these twin treaties, which would become known collectively as the Treaty of Birgham, Margaret’s succession was guaranteed by her betrothal to Edward of Caernarvon, the English Prince of Wales. Wondrous news for all who cared, but Will Wallace was much more concerned with his own betrothal, a secret pact about which I had learned only very recently, when his frustration with the slowness of time boiled over.

  Royal betrothals were, of course, affairs of state, and ordinary people knew little or nothing about them. We of the Abbey fraternity learned a little more as the proceedings developed, since the treaties were drafted by our religious and clerical brethre
n in various locations, and the word, privileged and close held as it was, spread quickly through our communities. In those early days everyone was happy with what was happening because it served multiple purposes, not the least of which was a settlement of the increasingly rancorous rivalry between the two noble Houses of Bruce and Balliol—including by extension the House of Comyn, inextricably linked with Balliol through blood and marriage—over their competing claims to the succession. Fostered by those feelings of goodwill, and unbelievable though it seems now from more than fifty years’ distance, no one in Scotland objected strongly to Edward Plantagenet’s claim to acknowledgment as feudal overlord of Scotland in return for his services as arbiter. That was perceived to be a matter of semantics rather than literal interpretation, for the feudal laws of the time attested to the spirit of that convention of overlordship—most of the Scots magnates had held lands in England for generations under feudal grants from English monarchs—and the Treaty of Birgham clearly stated that the realm of Scotland would remain “separate and divided from England according to its rightful boundaries, free in itself and without subjection.” No man in Scotland could even have imagined that Edward of England might soon insist upon the letter of that unwritten accord and claim the throne of Scotland for himself.

  In the eyes of the Scots populace, the single noticeable thing to grow out of those preliminary agreements was an increasing presence of English soldiery and men-at-arms within the realm. It began quietly and with all the appearances of legitimacy; England’s King had declared his goodwill in the matter of the Scots succession and was involved with the magnates of the noble houses in ensuring their commitment to the Birgham agreement. To that end, and on his regal behalf, detachments of English soldiery soon began to move freely throughout the land, tending to King Edward’s affairs and safeguarding his interests, and in the beginning no one, including our little circle of family and friends, paid much attention to their comings and goings.